A bumpy ride along the U.S.-Mexico border

NACO, Ariz. — This southern Arizona border, where the United States of America meets Mexico, is one of the most ethereally beautiful places in the world--but it is also one of the strangest.

When you gaze across the vastness of the Sonoran desert to the south, it looks as quiet as farmland in southern Wisconsin. You could have heard a pin drop at the border crossings the day I was here, American officials lounging on one side, Mexicans on the other, in the early spring sun.

This is why many so visitors call it an "invisible border." There is a quite neighborly border community of local, longtime residents of both sides. But the spirit of the border is far from invisible. I took a bumpy ride along it, and it was instructive--as most bumpy rides are.

The U.S. Border Patrol took me for hours along the jerry-built but effective fence that unobtrusively divides much of the border between Naco and Douglas to the east. Such a ride is an exercise in the surrealism of nation-states today, policed by watchtowers videotaping the border and sensors that go off should anyone cross them. The Border Patrol every day pulls old tires linked by a cable along the fence to cover previous footprints, so that new ones can be detected. Border agents have in fact become psychologists, as well as policemen.

Some Border Patrol members, for instance, are natural specialists in looking for and judging footprints and can immediately recognize new human footprints on the small pathway along the fence. This becomes complicated because, in this strange game of seek and seek-to-avoid, some illegal immigrants wear shoes that make footprints like hooves, and some walk backward across the line to confuse the "gringos." I was frankly impressed with the often subtle ways the agents could handle things.

At the new state-of-the-art Douglas border station, we stood in the incredible Dispatch Room, where agents were scanning screen after screen for images sent back to them by the towers along the border, looking for illegals trying to cross.

Suddenly, at one point of the border, the form of a man darted out of Agua Prieta, a town across the border from Douglas on the Mexican side, and dashed toward Arizona soil. He ran across the fields like some maddened creature on a life-or-death mission; he would fall occasionally, then get up to run again. Finally, he entered the housing area of Douglas and, as we left, the agents were calling in Border Patrol to apprehend him--and take him back to the border port.

I felt sorry for him, but mostly I felt anger and rage toward a Mexican government that could stop its inexcusable corruption, develop its country and give its people the respect of being able to live at home, if it willed itself to do so.

I asked my guide, Greg Maier, a public information agent who is especially well-informed, "When this man is apprehended, how will agents know who he is or where he is from? What if he has no documents?"

The agents' savvy, moxie or just plain instinctive knowledge of human psychology have to snap into place--or not.

"Many [illegals] have fake IDs," he explained, "and some have 10 different names. The experienced agent can tell if they're Mexican or not. They'll say, 'You don't look Mexican to me--sing me the Mexican national anthem.' There are words used in Mexico that are not used in Central America. Or they'll pull out Mexican change to see if the man recognizes the money. Then they'll confront him, saying, `We know you're lying.'

"You can tell guys who have been caught before--they're friendly and they tell jokes, because they know they'll only be sent back. Then there are the ones who are just scared to death, because for all you know, the last time they saw a uniform, it was a nightmarish experience--you take them to the port to be returned and they can't believe that that was it!

"Then there are the ones who look frightened--but with a different look. Sometimes you handcuff them right away, and almost always sure enough, you find out he's wanted for something.

"There's no way for new guys to pick up these techniques; it's trial and error, really, for a long time. When you come in as an agent, you hit the ground and you think, `What am I doing?'"

After Washington moved to control the California border, illegal immigrants wanting to enter America flocked to this remote and empty ranching section of Arizona. On any one day, there are 17,000 regular residents in down-on-its-luck Douglas, a formerly rich mining town where ranchers have been organizing to turn in aliens invading their lands. And there are 100,000 people across the border in Agua Prieta, waiting to sneak or to be smuggled across.

Last year, there were more than 345,000 adult apprehensions and 17,000 child apprehensions in the Tucson Sector of the Border Patrol--an extraordinary number.

I left Naco and Douglas that day convinced that our Border Patrol is doing an excellent and morally innovative job against odds that are getting worse all the time.

But while their work may be admirable, there is no excuse for a nation such as America to not have a real immigration policy.